Uncorrected Evidence 103

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Oral evidence

Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts

on Wednesday 1 December 2004

Members present:

Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair

Mr Frank Field

Mr Gerry Steinberg

Jon Trickett

________________

Mr Tim Burr, Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, further examined.

Ms Paula Diggle, Second Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, further examined.

REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL:

Facing Justice: Tackling defendants' non-attendance at court (HC 1162)

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr John Gieve CB, Permanent Under Secretary of State, Home Office; Sir Ron de Witt, Chief Executive, Unified Courts Agency, Department of Constitutional Affairs; Mr Ken Macdonald QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, Crown Prosecution Service; Ms Moira Wallace, Chief Executive, Office for Criminal Justice Reform; and Mr John Burbeck, Chief Constable of Warwickshire, Association of Chief Police Officers, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are dealing with the subject Facing Justice: Tackling defendants' non‑attendance at court. We are joined once again by Mr John Gieve, who is Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office. You are very welcome. To save my breath would you like to introduce your team.

Mr Gieve: Starting on my right: Mr Ken Macdonald, the DPP; Sir Ron de Witt, who is Head of the Courts Service; Moira Wallace, who is Head of the Office for Criminal Justice Reform; and on my left, John Burbeck, who is Chief Constable of Warwickshire and also ACPO's lead on criminal justice reform.

Q2 Chairman: Thank you. You are all very welcome - a very distinguished set of witnesses - and we are very grateful to you for appearing this afternoon. I should also say that we are very grateful for the presence today of the Guernsey Committee of Public Accounts. We have already had a chance to brief them and I hope they will find our hearing interesting. Perhaps I could ask you, Mr Gieve, to start this hearing by looking at Paragraph 2.30 which you can find on Page 29. You will see there that it says: "In one area we visited, half of the outstanding unexecuted warrants were for defendants who live in another criminal justice area or had no fixed address." Mr Gieve, how are you going to stop criminals getting away with their depredations if they can go home, keep their heads down and commit a crime in another area?

Mr Gieve: First of all, we thought this report was extremely valuable. It did point up areas where we are not joining up the different agencies effectively and Moira's office has been set up particularly to do that. I will ask John to talk about how we are going to capture people out of area, but Paragraph 2.30 also says that we have established a working group precisely to develop the protocol on how we follow up people who do not attend court, including those from out of area. John, do you want to add?

Q3 Chairman: I hope that you can add something on this. This is not rocket science. This has been going a long time. Mr Burbeck, are there any incentives for the police to follow up on these warrants?

Mr Burbeck: The position is that regardless of incentives I set up a working group in the earlier part of this year which has now reported and come up with a matrix, a proposal, a way forward that all forces are signed up to, and the principle is that for every warrant, no matter where the offender may reside and no matter where they may have committed an offence, we go through an intelligence-led prioritisation and if the offence was serious ‑ race crime, serious assault or other serious offence ‑ or if the offender is a persistent offender then they get a top category and every force who has any involvement in the case of that offender will execute the warrant.

Q4 Chairman: I understand that.

Mr Burbeck: This is a new process which we have just brought in.

Q5 Chairman: Why it has taken so long I do not know, but only 45% of bail warrants are executed within three months in 2002. That is pretty appalling, is it not?

Mr Burbeck: There was much for us to learn. In fact, as the Audit Commission report says, we have been making significant progress and what I can say from the police side is that we have an approach which will ensure that in future the position will be better than it has been in the past.

Q6 Chairman: Mr Gieve, could you look please at Case Study C which you can find on Page 26. This relates to what Essex has been trying to do. For instance, they are arresting and bringing defendants back to court on the day they fail to attend. I should say I know a bit about this because 30 years ago I was a young barrister going around the courts in London and we had precisely this problem. I do not know how frustrated I got. It is one of the reasons I went into politics finally, with the endless delays, turning up to courts and the police were not there, the defendant was not there and, frankly, everybody, including the defence, was very happy for the thing to be adjourned again and again and again. So if Essex is obviously doing a good job - and if we look at Case Study C they are doing some obvious things like reducing the number of hearings and the defendant being given a specific time of appointment and Essex is now embedding these changes which will test the feasibility of arresting and bringing defendants back to court - why has this not happened all the time in every place?

Mr Gieve: Well, first, I recognise and we all recognise the position that there have been many too many adjournments and we have set ourselves a target, as you will have seen, to reduce the percentage of ineffective trials by a quarter. Essex is one of the areas where we have been piloting a new approach and when we evaluated those I think we will be rolling it out more widely. Moira Wallace will speak to this.

Ms Wallace: What we have done, as the Report alludes to, is we set up an umbrella programme called the Criminal Case Management Programme which is trying to pick up these problems and identify things and work to tackle them. Essex is just one of seven areas that we have been piloting changes in. I agree with you that some people may think why has this not been done before. However, they are now being rolled out across the country and they are starting to have some effect. For example, we have seen the number of ineffective trials as a result of offender non‑attendance going down in the magistrates' court from 5.4% to 4% in the latest quarter and in the crown courts to 3.2% from 4.5% and we are starting to have an impact.

Q7 Chairman: About time too. Certainly I have known that it has been going on for 30 years and presumably it was going on for another 30 years before that. As you have got the floor, Ms Wallace, you head something called the Office for Criminal Justice Reform. That sounds a very grand institution but in fact it is a virtual reality body, it has no accounting officers, no accounts, it is composed of officials from DCMS, CPS and the Home Office, and it has no executive powers to enforce its will, to have some sort of joined-up government in this?

Ms Wallace: The Office for Criminal Justice Reform does report to three ministers but it also reports to the National Criminal Justice Board which has on it the heads of all the agencies and we are all members of the National Criminal Justice Board.

Q8 Chairman: I am very interested in what it reports to but that is not the question I asked. It does not have any executive powers to enforce joined‑up government.

Ms Wallace: Yes, but the National Criminal Justice Board has those executive powers and it is committed to doing that. Our role is, first of all, to come up with changes that will help tackle these cross‑cutting problems, turn them into targets for the different agencies, and then report back to the National Criminal Justice Board on whether or not this is happening. So far this is a model that seems to be working.

Mr Gieve: In the criminal justice system there are bound to be some independent bodies and we have an independent prosecutor's office for good reasons, and the police are directly accountable to ministers, and we are bound to have a collection of responsibilities. What the OCJR is trying to do, with the support of all three departments, is nonetheless to look at the system as a whole to make recommendations, either to the national bodies to change what they are doing or to change their practice, or to local criminal justice boards to address particular local problems and try and make the system as a whole work better.

Q9 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Macdonald, if you look at Figure 1, which you can find on Page 10 you will see there are a number of reasons why trials do not go ahead on the scheduled day. Of course one is that the defendant fails to appear but then there is non‑attendance of prosecution witness, the prosecution is not ready to proceed, the defence is not ready to proceed. If you look forward to Case Study B, which you can find on page 25, it is an appalling example of where we had 18 hearings, with the defendant charged with two counts of assault. On the 18th hearing the second count of assault was dropped and the defendant was fined �100 for the assault charge for which he was convicted. Does it not make it even more difficult to get a grip on this if, notwithstanding the offender does not turn up, often the other people involved in the judicial process do not turn up or are not ready?

Mr Macdonald: It certainly does and I think that this is being addressed in a number of ways. I think the first thing is that we have introduced a reform to the charging process, which is to say that for all but the most minor charges now prosecutors rather than the police are responsible for selecting the appropriate charge in a criminal case. That means that there is a better chance and experience has shown that there is a better chance of getting the right charge at the beginning which reduces the need for adjournments and reduces the need for prosecutors' time to be spent amending cases and, for all those reasons, reduces the non‑attendance of prosecuting witnesses and defendants. One of the problems with constant adjournments obviously is that people lose the will to turn up if the case has been adjourned three or four times.

Q10 Chairman: I used to lose the will to turn up.

Mr Macdonald: So did I. The other important reform here is a programme called No Witness No Justice which is presently being rolled out across the country and which gives prosecutors a leading role in witness care. That is important because the prosecutor's interest in the case between charge and trial is at its strongest. We have got some �27 million or so from the Treasury last year and we are setting up witness care units across the country. Every criminal justice area will have one and various criminal justice centres as well. The idea is that every witness has a single point of contact, that their needs are assessed, that there is regular contact between prosecutors and witnesses prior to the trial. When this programme was piloted prior to its implementation we saw a significant reduction in the number of cases which were adjourned due to prosecution witness difficulties. It is perfectly clear that if you do not keep in touch with witnesses and you do not look after them between charge and trial there is going to be an attrition rate and that that been a problem historically. I think the No Witness No Justice programme is going to address that to an extent. It has to be seen in conjunction with the charging reform and in conjunction with the effective trial management reform which is the programme in Essex that you alluded to a moment ago. I think these three programmes together ought to make a significant difference to the number of cases which do not start when they are supposed to start.

Q11 Chairman: I always thought that it would be more effective having more stipendiary magistrates and more concentration of defendants and prosecution resources with stipendiary magistrates, who work much quicker than lay magistrates. Do you think there is anything in that?

Mr Macdonald: Stipendiary magistrates are certainly efficient and they are professional and they are lawyers so they bring particular skills to bear. My own view is that people still are attached and attracted to the idea of local lay justice in the magistrates' courts. There is one other change that is going to be very significant and that is the Lord Chief Justice in January 2004 issued a practice direction to the effect that when people are brought before the courts for breach of bail or for non‑attendance they ought to be dealt with immediately rather than have that issue adjourned until the end of their case, and consecutive prison sentences for those sorts of offence ‑ breaches of bail ‑ ought to be considered by the court. I think that is making a difference and I have issued guidance to prosecutors that they must urge courts to deal with breaches of bail and Bail Act offences at the time the individual is brought to court rather than adjourning them until the end of some trial because it is that sort of instant justice which I think drives home more successfully to defendants that there is a consequence to behaving in that way. As you will remember, if these breaches are adjourned until the end of cases, what usually happens is that the court imposes no additional penalty for them. So the message goes out if you breach your bail nothing much is going to happen to you. We have got to change that culture.

Q12 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Gieve, we can find another bad part of this report at Paragraph 3.7 on Page 32 and there we read the appalling situation that the Prison Service only produces reports on 22% of all eligible remand prisoners and therefore for a lot of people the courts do not have the information available and a lot of people are kept unnecessarily on remand. If you go over the page to Figure 11 on Page 33 you can see that some prisons are virtually not doing their job at all in producing that information. We hear so much about the prisons being full and here is a duty laid upon them by the Department and nothing is happening.

Mr Gieve: I think there is variation between prisons and we are ‑‑‑

Q13 Chairman: Well, I would say there is a variation. It goes from nearly 0% in Wandsworth up to 90% in Manchester and Styal. So certainly there is an enormous variation. What is going on in the Prison Service?

Mr Gieve: We are looking at the ones at the bottom end and indeed at the ones at the top end.

Q14 Chairman: You are looking at a lot of things at the moment, are you not, on this subject?

Mr Gieve: Yes of course we are, it is a report.

Q15 Chairman: Why has it taken so long? Why is there no lack of urgency about something which has been apparent to anybody in the criminal justice system not for a year or two years or seven years but ten, 20, 30 or even 50 years?

Mr Gieve: I can only speak for the last few years. We have set up an unprecedented joint body to look at the whole system precisely because in this respect and in several others the system as a whole has been dysfunctional and has wasted people's time and wasted cost. On this particular point you have raised, about a quarter of prisoners refuse to co‑operate in bail reports in prison. Some people want to be in prison on remand because they think it will be better to serve on remand rather than wait until after conviction. Of the rest, our assessment is that 70% are interviewed. Not all of those lead to bail reports because quite often there is not much the prison can add, ie, the person's circumstances are already known, they have already ‑‑‑

Q16 Mr Field: --- got a criminal record.

Mr Gieve: So on the whole the prisons focus on sending reports where they think it will make a difference. There is still 30% who are not interviewed and particularly in some of the big local prisons like Birmingham, for example, and I think in one of the London prisons which the NAO visited, they found it hard to interview all the people who were coming through their prisons. It is not the case, however, that we want or would be able to produce 100%, firstly, because some people will not co‑operate and, secondly, because there is not much point in a report in some cases.

Q17 Chairman: Sir Ron, I will end with you and then give my patient colleagues a chance to come in. My last point concerns communication between the courts and the police. If you look at Paragraphs 2.15 and 2.16 which you will find on Page 22 you will see: "In the areas we visited there were no written agreements between the courts and local police governing the extent and depth of any monitoring of bail conditions." In 2.16: "There is no provision for magistrates and judges to be made aware of the extent to which local police are monitoring compliance with conditions and therefore whether the conditions they set were likely to be effective. If you go back to Paragraph 2.6 on Page 19 you can see that it is difficult for you or anybody else to rely on magistrates' courts records which apparently are not in a fit state for the Home Office. What is going on here?

Sir Ron de Witt: If I speak first about the poor communications with defendants, I think there are two parts on that. The crown court produces forms at the moment that are quite legible. I do not think there are any particular problems there.

Q18 Chairman: No, the problems are clearly with the magistrates' courts.

Sir Ron de Witt: With the magistrates' courts I, too, since coming into this position, have looked at those forms and completely concur that they are illegible in some cases, primarily due to the use of handwritten carbon copies.

Q19 Chairman: Handwritten carbon copies?

Sir Ron de Witt: The use of carbon copies and handwritten forms.

Q20 Chairman: We still use handwritten carbon copies?

Sir Ron de Witt: In some courts, yes.

Q21 Chairman: Do we also use quill pens?

Sir Ron de Witt: I have not observed that yet. What we are looking at now is a common national standard across the country, drawing on the best practice from both crown courts and in some cases magistrates' courts. There are examples of good practice where it is actually working quite well. With the introduction of modern IT this problem will be eradicated entirely and we hope that will ‑‑‑

Q22 Chairman: Yes, we know all about IT. Carry on.

Sir Ron de Witt: In terms of communications with the police, we are working very closely with the police to look at new formats of communication and to improve the forms that we send to the police to get them to look at that and we are working closely with John, and John might want to add on a project that he has been working on.

Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Steinberg?

Q23 Mr Steinberg: Mr Macdonald, just to comment on one or two of the answers that you gave to the questions that I was not going to go into but you seemed to confirm to me what I have thought for years when you said that your organisation would decide the charges to be brought to court rather than the police. That is the wrong way round.

Mr Macdonald: I do not agree with you at all.

Q24 Mr Steinberg: I am not bothered whether you agree with me or not.

Mr Macdonald: Can I be clear, we have only taken over that power in the last few months. Traditionally it has been the police who have selected the charges. It has only been with the charging reform which has only been in effect in certain areas of the country since the beginning of November.

Q25 Mr Steinberg: My experience has been that for the last few years the Crown Prosecution Service have gone clearly for the easy option because they may have had to have a little bit of a battle trying to get the harsher option and people are not getting justice because, frankly, it is your organisation that is deciding what the charge should be. If it were up to the police we would be seeing people actually charged for the offences that they are committing and not for some minor offence. Let me take, for example, killing by people in a motor car where perhaps dangerous driving might get the person seven years and you go for careless driving which might get them a fine of 150 quid because, frankly, I do not think you have got the capability of being able to prosecute harshly enough

Mr Macdonald: Decisions about what the appropriate criminal charge is, it seems to me, are decisions which are best taken by lawyers because in order to determine what a charge is you have to apply the law to a set of facts.

Q26 Mr Steinberg: I would disagree with you because lawyers are there to do a job in terms of what charges the police have put forward. I have a son and daughter who are lawyers and it is nothing to do with them what the charges are. They are there to defend or prosecute the particular charges the police think have been committed, not what you think have been committed.

Mr Macdonald: I do not agree with you at all. The charges have to go before criminal courts and they have to be prosecuted. If the charge is wrong all that happens is that the time of the prosecutor ‑‑‑

Q27 Mr Steinberg: So it is up to your organisation to decide whether the charge is wrong or right, is it?

Mr Macdonald: It is up to us to decide what the appropriate charge is. If you apply an inappropriate charge all that happens is that court time, prosecutor time and defence lawyer time is taken up withdrawing charges, changing charges, dumping charges. This charging programme reform was proposed by Lord Justice Auld in his report into the criminal justice system and it was piloted across 14 priority areas (which is about 60% of the country) in 2003. The result of it was that the conviction rate increased by 15%, the guilty plea rate increased by 30%, and the discontinuance rate decreased by 69%.

Q28 Mr Steinberg: Big deal. That means that I am quite happy to declare myself guilty of careless driving to get a 100 quid fine when I know if I am brought forward for dangerous driving I might get eight years. I am sure you are delighted that you are getting more successful prosecutions. Get away! That does surprise me!

Mr Macdonald: This is about ensuring that criminal charges which are proceeded with at the start are the right criminal charges not the wrong criminal charges. It is simply not the case ‑‑‑

Q29 Mr Steinberg: But it is not up to your organisation to decide that.

Mr Macdonald: Of course it is.

Q30 Mr Steinberg: Of course it is not. It is up to the jury to decide.

Mr Macdonald: It is up to us to decide what is an appropriate charge to place before a jury and that is the purpose ‑‑‑

Q31 Mr Steinberg: I just do not agree with you.

Mr Macdonald: Obviously the jury decides on the basis of the evidence that is brought whether a man is guilty or not but bringing a criminal charge is a different test to the jury. A criminal charge is brought if first there is a realistic prospect of conviction (which means simply a better than 50% chance) and also if it is in the public interest to prosecute. The jury will convict if they are sure beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty. Those are different tests.

Q32 Mr Steinberg: It is your job as prosecuting solicitors or lawyers to put forward a case so that the jury has no doubt.

Mr Macdonald: No it is not.

Q33 Mr Steinberg: Yes it is.

Mr Macdonald: No it is.

Q34 Mr Steinberg: Of course it is. People are walking the streets who are damn well guilty because you do not bring the right charges.

Mr Macdonald: It is not our job to proceed with a case for which there is no evidence.

Q35 Mr Steinberg: In your view.

Mr Macdonald: Yes, that is my view.

Mr Steinberg: Frankly, no wonder the Crown Prosecution Service is the way it is if it is up to you to make the decisions. Let's move on ‑‑‑

Q36 Chairman: Did you want to say something Mr, Gieve?

Mr Gieve: Can I just add something on this. I think you are complaining about experience over a number of years when the police chose the charge not the prosecutor.

Q37 Mr Steinberg: No, I am sorry, you are wrong, Mr Gieve.

Mr Gieve: Because this is quite a new reform. The second point is that I think the old system under which the police chose the charge and then sent the file up the road ‑‑‑

Q38 Mr Steinberg: I have two girls in my constituency dead and the police wanted to bring charges of dangerous driving or even more serious charges and the Crown Prosecution Service would not because they were not sure they were going to get a conviction. That to me is absolutely outrageous.

Mr Macdonald: That is not the test for bringing a prosecution. The test for bringing a prosecution is not that we have to be sure that there is going to be a conviction, it is that there is a realistic prospect of conviction, which means a more than 50% chance.

Mr Steinberg: There was one which had a 100% chance.

Chairman: Mr Steinberg, Mr Field has a supplementary to your question which he is anxious to ask. Do you mind if he comes in with one quick supplementary and then you can carry on.

Q39 Mr Field: It is a supplementary in stages and it follows Mr Steinberg's point. You talked about this whole rate of attrition of people turning up to court, which accords with my experience recently of trying to bring a case. First of all, the police thought there was a case but the Crown Prosecution Service unbeknown to me closed the case. I then had to get it opened again. What the local police thought was the charge was not the charge when we finally months and months and months later got into court. The court's first hearing was adjourned. I said that I did not want any settlement unless I was present and the Crown Prosecution Service said, "You have misunderstood this, you are just a witness." I said, "No, no, it is my case". "No, you are just a witness." "I am not just a witness, I am the only witness to this. It is something that happened against me." They then, against my express wishes, settled out of court with the defendant and the person got a rap on the knuckles. I was the one who was pushing this case, asking for it to occur, wishing to turn up, and I am treated like that, totally disempowered. Do you not understand why our constituents feel, as Mr Steinberg was saying, that this is not our legal system operating on behalf of us, it has been professionalised away from us and we cannot make our wishes felt through it, particularly when the in police acting on our side to bring cases have their knees knocked away from them by the professionals in the Crown Prosecution Service?

Mr McDonald: I understand what you are saying, as someone presumably who was a victim of crime, and it is absolutely right that prosecutors have not traditionally communicated properly with victims of crime. I think when my organisation, the CPS, was set up, it was actually ex-directory.

Q40 Mr Field: They communicated all right, I did not like what they were communicating and they did not listen to what I said.

Mr McDonald: I think there is a difficulty here which we have to confront, and it is that somebody has to decide what an appropriate charge is in a criminal case. It seems to me that that is a decision which has to be made by lawyers, as it is in every other jurisdiction apart from our own.

Q41 Mr Field: You should be an agent to help me get justice, not to actually exclude me from getting justice. That is how it turns out, this is what Mr Steinberg has been saying.

Mr McDonald: I certainly agree that victims and witnesses should not be excluded from justice, but I think that the final decision about what an appropriate criminal charge is has to be made by a prosecutor, and if the victim has a particular attitude about what a charge ought to be, clearly prosecutors ought to listen to that and take the victim's views into account, or the views of any witness, but the final decision has to be with the prosecutor. If the prosecutor disagrees with the victim, the prosecutor cannot advise that someone should be charged with an offence which he or she, the prosecutor, believes does not pass the appropriate test for prosecution, and sometimes that means that prosecutors will not do what victims and witnesses want. I think that is inevitable.

Q42 Mr Field: It is not just us, it is the police attitude. I did not know what the charge should be, but when the policeman took the statement finally - with a biro, taking an hour and a half with the policeman sitting by me, I could not actually dictate it separately and then get him to agree that that is what I actually did say - he told me how he thought the law would operate in these circumstances, that was the charge. The papers then go off and the Crown Prosecution not only close the case the next day, without even consulting me, but when they were finally forced to open the case again because there is an MP on the end of all of this, they downgraded what the police thought and advised me what the charge was, and instead of being my servant you were my master.

Mr McDonald: I do not know the facts of your particular case so I cannot comment on it, Mr Field, but prosecutors have to have a much closer relationship with the public and they need to engage more with the public, and we do now formulate our policies on prosecuting types of crimes, we engage with community groups, we hold public meetings and we take into account, where we can, the views of a community. We publish policies, for example, on domestic violence, serious sex crime, racially aggravated crime and so on; we publish these documents, we consult and we ask to be judged against them but, finally, there is a space here where prosecutors cannot just be the servants of people in the sense that you describe. I think it is appalling that you were not communicated with and it may be that your views were not adequately taken into account, but finally the prosecutor has to step back and make a decision, which is a legal decision, based upon his or her analysis of the evidence, on the application of the law to that. I would just like to say this, that this reform, the charging reform, has been strongly supported by the police. I know you will always get individual cases of officers saying that they have had bad experiences, but the police in general are strongly supportive of this reform, as I am sure Mr Burbeck will confirm. What we are doing here is entering territory which every other fair trial jurisdiction has been in for years; it has been an anomaly in this country that charging decisions have been made solely by the police.

Q43 Mr Field: One last point before we go back to Mr Steinberg - and I am grateful for intervening - you keep saying that your function is to decide whether it will be successful.

Mr McDonald: Yes.

Mr Field: Put yourself in the place of those parents who have lost their daughters; they are not too worried about whether it is the �100 fine or not, they want the major charge pushed in court. If in fact it does not carry in court they then walk out of court and say my goodness, that is shocking, but the thought of actually coming out and seeing somebody who has killed your child with a �100 fine because you could not actually get the courts to get the person who killed your daughter to face the charge which you think they should face, is far worse than you being able to tick a box and say success, �100 fine.

Q44 Mr Steinberg: Exactly.

Mr McDonald: Can I just answer that point since you make it? Some of the most difficult cases which I get to see are the sorts of cases you are talking about, probably the most difficult cases, but I do not think it is tenable to say there should be a criminal justice system where charges are brought even if the evidence does not support those charges. In essence, if we strip down what you are arguing for, it is a system which allows cases to get into court even if, on a legal analysis, the evidence does not support the charge, and I just do not think that that is a tenable position.

Q45 Mr Field: You have a dead body and a car.

Mr McDonald: The law says more than that you have a dead body and a car in order to support a charge of dangerous driving. You could have a dead body because somebody has jumped out off the pavement; that would not support a charge of dangerous driving.

Q46 Mr Steinberg: And you would not therefore take the case to court on that basis.

Mr Gieve: The point I want to raise here in response to both these points is that there are going to be frustrations and in particular cases there is going to be real anger, but actually part of the reason for making this change is to bring the prosecutors and the police closer together. In the past the police said "We think it is X", sent the papers down the road and then blamed the prosecutors in some cases for not vigorously prosecuting. What we are trying to do now is get the prosecutors into the police station, talking to the police about what evidence you need to get the more serious charge, and bringing these two sides together. I do see this, therefore, as a way of avoiding many of the frustrations that you are talking about, where someone says "We think it is X" but then does not necessarily investigate and collect the evidence that would be necessary to get X delivered in court.

Mr McDonald: That is an important point, that the responsibility for charging does not simply mean that you should be saying there is not enough evidence, that is the end of it, part of the process is to say this is the evidence that we need to support this charge, so the prosecutors take a far more proactive role in case-building. The relationship between the police and the prosecutors around charging is moving, I think, in the right direction.

Chairman: Mr Steinberg.

Q47 Mr Steinberg: I am not going to pursue this any further because we have spent a lot of time on it, I will get onto the report itself. This report is probably one of the most difficult parts of the criminal justice system, and before I read the report I thought that the only way possible to stamp it out completely would be to not have any bail or conditions that were like that, that everybody should be remanded, but when I read the report I found that even if they are remanded they do not get to court on time. Why is that?

Mr Gieve: The main reason why the people who are in prison do not get to court on time is because the prisons do not process them or the escort system does not get there on the dot.

Q48 Mr Steinberg: But that is outrageous. You presumably have a judge sitting waiting, a defence lawyer, a prosecution lawyer - all on probably �1000 a day or something - and the prison could not get them there on time? Well, well.

Mr Gieve: I agree that we should get them there on time.

Q49 Mr Steinberg: What are you going to do about it?

Mr Gieve: We have contracts with a variety of escort firms and we expect them to get them there on time. We penalise them if they are late.

Q50 Mr Steinberg: So Group 4 is to blame.

Mr Gieve: At the moment we have a number of different companies doing this so it is not just Group 4, but there are problems at the moment, more than there were earlier in the year, we have changed the contracts and we will make sure that they deliver.

Q51 Mr Steinberg: I have sat in court and watched and the amount of respect that some people have for the judicial system is nil, and the only way that you are going, in my view, to actually make people attend court is if the punishment for not doing so is severe enough. Would you agree with that?

Mr Gieve: The lack of respect can come from two quarters, one is repeatedly seeing that the system is ineffective - and we have to make it effective - the other is general disrespect for authority in all its forms, and I agree that having a suitable punishment for not turning up, for the disrespect, is part of the picture, and that is what the Lord Chief Justice recognised.

Q52 Mr Steinberg: What is a suitable punishment?

Mr Gieve: The Practice Direction which is currently operating is that courts should consider as a separate issue straightaway what is the suitable penalty for not turning up, and they should consider a prison sentence, but that will not always be suitable.

Q53 Mr Steinberg: Do you think the judge was right the other day to send somebody to prison for six months for taking mobile photographs on a mobile phone in court, for contempt of court?

Mr Gieve: I could not comment on that case, I do not know anything about it.

Q54 Mr Steinberg: Why not?

Mr Gieve: I do not know anything about it.

Chairman: He cannot comment on a particular case.

Q55 Mr Steinberg: Why not? The judge sent the person to prison for contempt of court because they were taking photographs in court, he got six months. Why cannot somebody who does not turn up for his bail conditions get six months in prison, why should they not get six months in jail?

Ms Wallace: They can.

Q56 Mr Steinberg: Why don't they?

Ms Wallace: We are seeing more custodial sentences for failing to appear and the maximum penalty for failing to appear in the Crown court is 12 months and the Magistrates' court is three months; we have seen an increase in consecutive sentencing, i.e. not just ignoring it and sentencing for the original offence.

Q57 Mr Steinberg: Why does somebody not come up with the idea, for example, that anybody who does not turn up for their court appearance be tagged automatically?

Ms Wallace: There is a possibility of considering tagging but again you have to look at costs and you have to look at those who will benefit from it.

Mr Gieve: In some cases where people do not turn up the court - and this is also something that we are encouraging the courts to do more often - proceeds with the trial and not to adjourn it, even if they do not turn up, and that is sometimes possible. There are always particular features of particular cases, so in the end you have got to allow the judge or the magistrate to consider those.

Mr Steinberg: The general public are sick and tired and fed up with the criminal justice system which you five people are involved in, they are utterly fed up with it. They do not see any fairness in the system, they see the criminal getting away with it, they see people getting off, they see people walking the streets who they know are causing havoc all over the place and, frankly, you just seem to me to be very complacent about it all and you do not seem to understand the misery that some people have because of some of these louts who are getting away with murder.

Q58 Chairman: Literally with murder this week.

Mr Gieve: I sincerely hope they will not get away with this murder, and in fact we bring most murderers to justice. I resent the charge of complacency, you are speaking as though we have just come on this report and no one was doing anything about it. We have introduced a massive programme of criminal justice reform over the last few years, including on antisocial behaviour, precisely to address the issues that you are talking about.

Q59 Mr Steinberg: Mr Gieve, I invite you to come on some of my surgeries with me on a Saturday morning; the main item now that I get - I do not know about other members but I suspect it is not out of the ordinary - at every surgery that I go to, I get people coming to me complaining about the criminal justice system and the harassment, the hassle and the unfairness of it all.

Mr Gieve: I do, as part of my job, go out and talk to people. I was in Leicester the other day talking to a couple who had been badly harassed over many years and I could see the frustration and despair they had and I felt very angry about it. I absolutely do understand what you are talking about and we are trying to address it, to get a system which works better, brings more people to justice, which has the right charges on patterns of behaviour as well as on individual acts. We are on this case, we genuinely are.

Q60 Mr Steinberg: In the report I read where the court - see if I have it right - decides on who to give bail to, and if they decide there is a particular character who they have doubts about, they still give them bail but they then say they must report to the police and - believe it or not - 50% of them do not report to the police. It is obvious, is it not, that that is going to happen? Why are they given bail in the first place? They know that these people are not going to attend court, so what do they do? They say they must report to the police, knowing damn well that they are never going to report to the police, or a big percentage of them are not. Why are they given bail in the first place? That is a stupid system, it is a nonsense system.

Mr Gieve: You have to understand that the starting presumption is that people are entitled to bail unless certain conditions are met and, in fact, as this report shows, 85% of those given bail turn up. Now 85% is too low and we want to drive it up, and there are a number of things in this report and other reports which will drive it up, but we are never going to get to 100% because there are always going to be people who we do not know very much about and it is right that the court should give them the benefit of the doubt. There are always going to be some people who the court has to make a balanced judgment on, they may not turn up but the risk is not so severe that it justifies holding them in custody, which is extremely expensive, as you know. We believe we can get the 85% further up, but there is no system in the world to get it to 100%.

Q61 Mr Steinberg: Changing the subject slightly again, I was told over the weekend that if somebody does not turn up in court it takes the Magistrates' court a week to inform the police that they did not turn up in court, and therefore it takes over a week for the police then to re-arrest that person. How does it take a week for a court to inform the police, when you can go to a computer and you can type an email and within 10 seconds the police could know that that person has not come to court. Why does it take a week? What this person then told me was that they now know, in certain areas, that it is going to take over a week for the police to be informed so the solicitors can get to the defendant within that week and get them to court to apologise, and nothing happens.

Sir Ron de Witt: I think part of the problem is what I alluded to earlier, that at the moment most things are done manually, but we have introduced a secure email system to try and improve the communication system, and as you will have seen from the report there are trials that have taken place that have shown that has improved communications with the police dramatically. I agree with you that it should not take a week to communicate that, but part of the processes that we are putting in place now are trying to make sure that that does not happen in the future.

Mr Steinberg: I will finish now - I have another three pages and I could go on for another hour but I will not - just to say - and I am not joking - that the two most arrogant organisations that I deal with as a Member of Parliament are the Magistrates' courts and the Crown prosecution Service.

Chairman: I think that was a statement rather than a question. Mr Field.

Q62 Mr Field: Can I begin by saying that whilst Mr Steinberg has expressed very forcibly his constituents' unease about the criminal justice system, it is not confined just to Durham. Clearly, the issue about confidence in the law being on the side of decent citizens is not an isolated issue, there are quite fundamental changes occurring in our society and this is one of them. Mr McDonald, I think we have had a real difficulty in communicating to you that the legal profession now is in a cocoon of its own, and trying to reform, no doubt thinking that it is responding well, but a growing number of my constituents do not, generally speaking, see you on their side but somehow taking jurisdiction away from them, making it more difficult for them to feel that they can make their views effective in court, even if they lose. I think that is a very important message for you to take away, that there is a generality of issues here with which we are concerned. I would like, chairman, to ask Moira two questions. You have explained that part of the role of your new body is to set targets, and we know targets can play a part in reforming performance, but if we were not looking at your level but looking at the Wirral level, where does the buck stop for this non-performance of the court system?

Ms Wallace: Looking at it right across the criminal justice system we have in each police area an organisation called the Local Criminal Justice Board which has all the local chief officers on it. The people on that Board are responsible not only individually to the Courts Service but also collectively to the National Criminal Justice Board, and it is my job in a way to hold them to account. Let us take the example of failure to appear; in the course of this year we are rolling out to all areas performance data on how quickly warrants are being executed, how many are outstanding and that sort of thing. Next year we will have local targets, local areas will set their own targets and we will monitor those collectively, but individual agencies will also have targets. For example, the Courts Service will have a target - picking up Mr Steinberg's point - to get the warrant from the court to the police in one working day, they will be held to account and we will measure that. Anyone who is failing to do that will get a friendly visit saying why, how can we help?

Q63 Mr Field: When you have your next meeting will there be on the agenda your 12 worst courts for getting cases completed?

Ms Wallace: Certainly the National Criminal Justice Board will look at the areas that are doing worst, but we cannot do it simply in terms of courts because it requires more agencies, the court is just the place where it happens. So we will look at how the police, the CPS, the courts, the probation service and so on are working together and we will look at the performance in the light of that.

Q64 Mr Field: But the worry about looking at how they are all working together - and they clearly are not working together well enough - is that nobody gets their backside kicked.

Ms Wallace: People are getting their backsides kicked. It is no fun to be told that you are missing your targets, and I think the local areas and the people around this table take it very seriously; no one wants to be the person at the bottom of the league table who is commented on again and again and told that they need to do better. Let us add some facts to that, we have set targets for the criminal justice system, we have set targets to bring more cases to justice and we have increased that by over 9% in two years. We have set targets to reduce the number of ineffective trials in the Crown court and we have cut that by a quarter. These are actually quite dramatic changes and I think there is a case that this kind of process and performance management can work and is working.

Q65 Mr Field: When you say nobody likes to know that they are not meeting their target, who else knows they are not? Where is any shame attached to this?

Ms Wallace: The information is available, it is available on the web and so on; I do not think we have quite got into public naming and shaming but I think areas know when they are doing well and when they are not doing well.

Q66 Chairman: Actually, why not name and shame them? Why not? If some court or some body is not performing in Huddersfield or something, why not name and shame them in the Huddersfield Examiner? Why not?

Sir Ron de Witt: Perhaps I could add that in the new structure that I have been put in post to put in place, we are bringing together the management of all the courts by the criminal justice area, so there will be one accountable manager for the courts system by area. That will improve the ability to hold people to account in terms of the courts' perspective as to what is actually happening. There are seven regions and they are directly accountable to me, so we will actually have a performance management framework for the courts that will be much more concise and clear.

Q67 Mr Field: Is not one of the dangers of targets that we are talking about that we as politicians look at these targets and you are then criticised for not winning a certain percentage of the cases which are actually brought into court. If you look at, say, questions of fraud where it may not be possible always to actually win the case, I know people who have been accused of fraud who, had they appeared in court, even if they got off, would have found it less easy to glide among some of the social groups they wished to glide amongst because, as my constituents would say, no smoke without fire. They would be stigmatised in a way, even if we could not make the charge stick, people would have thought there was a charge at least to answer. Is not one of your dangers that we set you targets which mean you have to play safe by excluding some of these cases where the shame of a court appearance and the publicity that might come with that is denied?

Mr McDonald: You mean that we would not prosecute or we would prosecute those cases within our targets?

Q68 Mr Field: Because you think the chances are we would not get a prosecution so we will not put it forward, whereas going into court and having to account for yourself can be an important way of trying to curb people's behaviour in future, or other people who may say it is not easy to get off now.

Mr McDonald: There is obviously a tension between making independent prosecutorial decisions and the idea of something like a conviction target. I do not think we have a conviction target, but I think we ought to have targets around issues like ineffective trials, getting witnesses to court at the right time and so on and so forth. There is not such a thing as a conviction target ---

Q69 Mr Field: With Mr Steinberg you were arguing you have to weigh up whether you think you are going to win.

Mr McDonald: No, the decision we have to make at that stage, the charging stage, is whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction, and that simply means a better than evens chance of winning. We do not expect to win all the cases that we bring, though we do actually win 98% of our cases in the magistrates' court and 90% in the Crown court - that is convictions and pleas of guilty - but in the Crown court, contested cases, I think we win about 60% or so. If you are making the judgment on the basis of just a better than evens chance, it is the sort of result I think you would expect. We could win more of our cases by being far more cautious about the ones that we bring and we could lose more by being less cautious; I think the balance is about right, although I accept there are individual cases where people are going to feel bitterly disappointed by the decisions that are made. We do not think of any of the targets as being conviction targets, I am not sure we operate that way. Can I just respond to something you said earlier about public confidence? Everyone understands - I am talking about the Crown Prosecution Service at the moment - that this is an organisation that in the past has not been held in high esteem and has been seen as being remote and unresponsive. There is a real attempt at the moment to get this organisation to engage better with the community so the prosecutors are being asked to go out to meet people, to explain themselves and to deal much more openly with victims and witnesses, and I think we are making progress in this area. What we want to try and do is to turn the CPS into a proper public prosecuting service that people understand is doing their work in the criminal justice system. This is a pretty major transformation but I think we are making progress.

Q70 Mr Field: It is welcome, but I can introduce you to various communities in Birkenhead who are very unrepresentative of the town, and the engagement really is with those people who feel the service has not actually delivered to them. The Birkenhead communities do not generally have a view, but a lot of people have some very specific views that they would like to put to you. My last question is to Moira. I think it is in chapter 2, the courthouse in Birkenhead is in an alcohol-free zone but, increasingly, cases do not take place in court because the defendant turns up drunk, so first of all he cannot come into the zone and, secondly, he is not in any fit state to plead. It is a shameful event that is occurring, but is that one which is reported in other areas or is it at the moment unique to the town that I have the honour of representing?

Ms Wallace: I have not heard of that before, I do not know if Ron has. I think that might be something to look into.

Mr Gieve: Can I just add on confidence that one of the overall measures we use for all three departments is the level of public confidence in the criminal justice system; this is one of the areas where we measure our success, not just by the numbers of cases that are processed, but by whether or not the level of confidence improves. This is one area where the final outcome is what you are talking about.

Q71 Mr Field: It depends how you ask the question. If you ask my constituents "Are you confident in the criminal justice system?" they are going to think what sort of question is this, and they might say yes or no, but if you ask them the question "Do you think too many tow rags get off when they should actually be convicted?" I think you would get them a different answer.

Mr McDonald: We ask whether they believe the criminal justice system is effective at bringing people to justice.

Q72 Mr Field: It is just that the way you ask the question will shape the answer.

Mr McDonald: We try to do it properly.

Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Trickett?

Jon Trickett: I would say first of all that the fact that people do not turn up at magistrates courts is a reflection of the lack of respect that sections of the population have for the criminal justice system. Certainly in my constituency there is a breakdown of confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole, and there are several reasons for that but one of the very strong reasons is the arrogance and remoteness of the CPS; that is just a fact. I had a case, for example, where it took the Home Secretary to apologise to my constituents - another case of a young girl of 16 years old being killed. The CPS made gross mistakes in the way that case was handled; I took it eventually to Jack Straw, he apologised before the CPS would apologise and even then the apology of Mr Geddes was mealy-mouthed. This was a case where the parents read of the trial in a paper, after it had taken place, for example. The other reason for the breakdown of confidence and respect is the dilution of charges and the turf war that has gone on between the police and the CPS, in both my constituency, in Wakefield as a whole - of which my constituency is a part - and in West Yorkshire as a whole, and throughout the rest of the country too. There is a serious turf war and you get the police and the CPS briefing against each other to the witnesses and to the victims; that is something which brings disrespect as well. I had an incident in Featherstone, which I have the honour of representing, where a chap and two of his colleagues held the town with a crossbow and some bowie knives for about seven hours. He was finally arrested by an armed squad, but he was back on the street within hours. When I heard about this I was obviously horrified, but as I began to speak to people I discovered that everybody in the town and every agency in the system knew about this man, his history, his family breakdown and all the other problems which the chap had, but he was still walking the streets. This brings me to the point of the question that I want to put to you: all the agencies will tell me that they know who the villains are and they know the kind of recidivists who fail regularly to turn up at the magistrates court. Why are we not focusing on the real hardcore villains which, in each community, is a handful of people who are destroying communities? We know these people - or certainly you do between you - at a local level; why on earth are we allowing them to just walk the streets when we know that the charges will put them back out within minutes when they do not turn up?

Q73 Chairman: Let Mr Burbeck have a shout because this is a practical problem

Mr Burbeck: Can I firstly comment on the CPS charging issue? I am sorry if in your particular area there have been some problems between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service because this is something that we have worked on very closely together. In fact, before Ken McDonald came, with his predecessor, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service worked up some pilot sites and indeed Halifax was one such site. It was so successful, what occurred there with the Crown Prosecution Service on charging, that we have rolled this out nationally. Not all police officers are happy with it, in part ---

Q74 Jon Trickett: Very few are, to be honest.

Mr Burbeck: No, that is not right.

Q75 Jon Trickett: I am not just speaking for my own patch, I speak to many, many MPs who have the same experience, frankly.

Mr Burbeck: Some of the staff are not very content with it - for all sorts of reasons - partly because we require much higher standards of them now, in the whole process, and because they are now working with lawyers we have got expertise of what is actually required in the court process rather than, for some of them, carrying on with some old, perhaps not so professional practices. That is the first thing, the police fully support this initiative but it is not perfect, so we are working to make it better. We also fully support the entire reform programme. Part of that is a particular initiative with regard to prolific offenders, launched in September, on the basis of what we had learned from the previous initiative which was called "persistent offenders". It is a slight change in name but it is intended to bring all the agencies together to focus on a small number of real troublesome individuals.

Q76 Jon Trickett: If 40 people out of 300,000 in Wakefield is your target then it is totally unacceptable, 40 people out of what is more than 300,000 residents in Wakefield. Your Prolific Offenders Scheme is 40 people. I represent 22 separate villages and most of those villages will have two or three people at least who are making misery for the whole village; 40 people is totally inadequate in terms of the problem we are facing. I know the names of the people but it is useless, it simply is not working.

Mr Burbeck: It has only been in place for two months and what we know from experience with the previous scheme is that if you take out those 40 most prolific offenders you will actually tackle an enormous amount of crime, but the second thing is that if we deal with them properly so that they stop committing crime again then what you have got is a long term solution. What has tended to happen in the past is that we have spread all our efforts across a wider range of offenders and not come to any solution; as a result, these persistent offenders are locked up for three months, six months, they come out and then they carry on committing crime. You might give them a fine, but they carry on causing trouble in their neighbourhoods. If you can take the first 40 away and deal with them on a permanent basis you can then tackle the next 40, and that is what we are all trying to do and we are all working together to achieve a realistic outcome for those individuals and, more importantly, for the communities they cause distress to.

Q77 Jon Trickett: I want to ask another question, because I am supposed to be going to another meeting which should have taken place half an hour ago. Why are you not able to identify the kind of recidivist people who are failing to go to court time after time after time and apprehend them before they abscond? Why are you not doing that?

Mr Gieve: We are trying to do that and John just spoke about one scheme, but there are also the new measures which we are expanding at the moment to deal with drug-related crime, because many of the most persistent and prolific offenders are drug-addicted and we have a programme of managing those much more closely and ensuring they get treatment. So in that way too we are trying to get to the problems that you are talking about. I would also like to mention the anti-social behaviour campaign, because some of this behaviour is serious and criminal, but some of it is a persistent pattern of harassment and nuisance, and we have introduced new measures to try and tackle that, I think quite effectively in a number of areas.

Q78 Jon Trickett: It is a culture of disrespect brought about, I think, in a large part by the failure of the people - yourselves really - operating at a local level. I want to move on to one particular point. In Appendix 5 you talk about West Yorkshire, which is obviously part of my patch; it has been put to you already that when somebody fails to appear in court it can take a long time for the police to be informed and a warrant to be issued. Here you describe collecting warrants from the courts three times a day and entering them onto a local database; one has a vision of the boys in blue walking around from the local cop shop to the magistrates court three times a day to pick up a list of the last lot of people who have not turned up, when they know very well who they are. Is that really what needs to be done, manually going around the courts in West Yorkshire three times a day to pick up a piece of paper, take it somewhere else and enter the names onto a local database. Then it says "However, there are plans for the courts to send warrants to the police electronically" - I do not want to be disrespectful, but some of the boys in blue will then take things down off the computer. Why not use email? If somebody absconds they are probably lying in bed, frankly, somewhere - they cannot be bothered to get out of bed, it is the kind of people we are dealing with - why not email straight through to the local police station and send somebody out to go and get them out of bed and get them to court?

Sir Ron de Witt: That is precisely what we are introducing.

Q79 Jon Trickett: This is an example of good practice by the way, collecting warrants from the courts three times a day and then entering them into a local database. We want some action, we want some movement. Surely you can email immediately from the court, this man should be here at ten o'clock, no doubt he is still in bed, go and get him. You have to begin to get confidence back so that people pay respect to the courts, which at the moment that underclass of people no longer have.

Sir Ron de Witt: I agree with you entirely and that is exactly what we are trying to do.

Q80 Jon Trickett: Is it true that people are walking around to the courts three times a day, picking up bits of paper?

Sir Ron de Witt: In some cases that is the process.

Mr Gieve: It is fair to say that we are planning in the first part of next year a major operation to get through the backlog of warrants. The report is pointing to an area of criminal justice where the system has not worked well, and we accept that, and that is what we are trying to improve.

Q81 Mr Field: The truth is, chairman, that when EDS runs this new computer system we will all be calling for that system to be reimposed.

Mr Burbeck: I have some West Yorkshire information here, just to give you an idea of how the situation has improved, and indeed they have got a new management system in place. If you go back 12 months they had very nearly 3,000 warrants outstanding; in October this year it is down to 1200 or 1300, so there is less than 50% of the problem they had 12 months ago. So all the agencies together are making a significant impact; it is not perfect, we are still working on it to get better and better, but already they have halved the problem.

Q82 Mr Steinberg: When I read the report I got the impression that the police were put under a tremendous amount of pressure on the basis of the follow-up work, the reports etc that they had to do. What function does the Probation Service offer in this whole sort of system?

Mr Gieve: The main thing we have been working on with the Probation Service in the last few years is to get them to report and enforces breaches of community penalties more than they used to. In 1997 about 50% of people failing to turn up to their community penalties were reported and taken back to court, we have now got that nearly to 90%. That is an example of how we are trying to tighten up the contribution of the probation service to the credibility of the rest of the system.

Q83 Mr Steinberg: I was suggesting something further, I was suggesting that perhaps the Probation Service should be made responsible for some of the activities that the police have to do at the present time. Why can the Probation Service not produce the information to the court that the police have to do at the moment? Why cannot the Probation Service, for example, on bringing offenders back to court, be responsible for that, why has it got to be the police?

Mr Gieve: For the under 18s I think the Youth Offending Teams do take part of the responsibility for managing the offenders both before the case and getting them to court, and I know the Probation Service have not had the powers to go and get the warrant from the court and go on and arrest people; probation officers are not police officers. It has to be a partnership. In terms of getting the information from the court which is dealt with here, the Probation Service has been concentrating on other things and has done less reporting than they used to, and what this report recommends and what we will do is to examine whether or not we should round that back up or target it more on particular sorts of offenders in order precisely to give the courts and therefore the other agencies a better service.

Q84 Mr Steinberg: When Mr McDonald was giving examples or saying what the aims of the organisation are, I was trying to rack my brains and think of examples. Two came to me like that. The first one was I had a constituent in my surgery about two months ago, she had been threatened over a mobile telephone by her husband that he was going to kill her; he had a history of violence towards her. I thought that was a very serious crime, the police told her it was a very serious crime and they would take the severe action that was necessary, because from past experience she knew that he might try and carry this threat out. The Crown Prosecution Service decided to prosecute him on the basis of misuse of a mobile phone or something and he got a conditional discharge. That is an example that just came to mind. Another example is one where I spent hours with a gentleman and he was actually wrong and the Crown Prosecution Service in my view were right in what they did. A relation walked into his house and hit him, over a will or something, and the Crown Prosecution Service might have been perfectly right in what they did, but the man was a difficult man and the Crown Prosecution Service would not meet him to discuss it because he was difficult.

Mr McDonald: I do not know the details of either of the cases that you have mentioned. So far as the first one is concerned, that is classed as domestic violence which we are pushing on much harder than we did traditionally, together with the police, and far more of those cases are being prosecuted and they should be because I think it is a hidden area of crime which can cross all classes everywhere. It needs to be addressed as a crime and prosecuted more vigorously. So far as the second case is concerned it is obviously of fundamental importance for us to communicate directly with victims when we decide not to prosecute their cases, and I accept that, but again we are trying to improve our performance in that area. We are trying to change the culture of quite a large organisation and I know that any MP, any other person, is going to have stories of bad examples and stories of bad practice, and that will apply to us as well as to other agencies and other organisations as well.

Q85 Mr Field: To MPs as well.

Mr McDonald: I would not comment on MPs. We are trying to address it and I think we are more outward-looking than we were. We are meeting people more than we did, we are looking after witnesses better than we did and we are certainly communicating with victims better than we have done in the past. At least we recognise now that that is the right direction to go in and we are putting significant resources and effort into it, but it is not going to change overnight.

Q86 Chairman: Right, gentlemen and lady, thank you very much for what has been a very interesting hearing. I think you understand from the questions that have been put to you how strongly we feel about this because this is what our constituents are telling us all the time; it is clear that the real problem is that no one agency oversees defendants on bail or is responsible for bringing them together and I think the real problem here lies with the courts and their archaic practices. The solution I think lies in what we have heard about Essex, particularly when they have conducted the warrant pilot in Southend which will test the feasibility of arresting and bringing offenders back to court the very day that they fail to attend trial. I hope that the National Audit Office, who have listened to all of this, will now produce a very strong report in which we will try and bring this to the public's attention. I hope that we can have a follow-up report so we can find out, because so much of what we have been told today is that things have been done and working parties are in place. We want to come back to this, I hope, in two or three years time and see, Ms Wallace, what you have achieved. You are clearly a very bright lady - you were the economic affairs private secretary to the Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997 - but if you succeed in doing what Essex are doing throughout the country, we will personally recommend that you become permanent secretary in two years time. Good luck.

Ms Wallace: Thank you.

Mr Field: That is your sentence.